Beyond dispute, there is a certain coven of reporters, columnists, and talking heads that hates President George W. Bush with a passionate intensity. Fascinatingly, their hatred derives not just from their profound disagreement with the President's policies. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, for example, simply detests everything about the President from his Texas swagger to his exercise habits. She harps away-sometimes humorously, more often venomously-in column after column. When hurricane Katrina hit, she positively throbbed with delight at having yet another cudgel with which to belabor her favorite target.

The Pavlovian quality of this response was perfectly predictable. To paraphrase Martin Peretz of The New Republic, President Bush could announce a cure for cancer tomorrow morning and Maureen Dowd would wonder publicly what took him so long. Similarly, when the circling sharks of the radical wing of the Democratic party saw blood in the water over the federal response to Katrina, they wasted little time in joining the feeding frenzy. It simply is in the nature of extreme partisans to attack, as it is in the nature of the left intelligentsia to engage in repetitive, toxic chatter. One can no more blame them for it than one can blame a scorpion for its sting.

And certainly, in the wake of Katrina, there is ample blame to go around. The President's initial response was flatfooted. Former FEMA director Michael Brown was obviously very, very much in over his head. Michael Chertoff, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, may have been a fine judge but an inspirational leader he is not.

Interestingly, when the Bush-haters in the media and the man-eaters in the loyal opposition began playing the blame game, state and local officials in Louisiana were not far behind. New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin charged that the White House "didn't have a clue." His director of emergency operations wailed that "We can send massive amounts of aid to tsunami victims, but we can't bail out the city of New Orleans." A spokesperson for Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco implied that the federal government was more interested in organization charts than in saving lives.

But as the mayor (who, Time magazine says, later left town to relocate his family to Dallas) dithered about ordering mandatory evacuation of his city and as the governor hesitated in sending in the Louisiana National Guard, the famously corrupt and famously inefficient New Orleans police department all but disappeared. Police officers walked off the job by the dozens, perhaps even the hundreds. Police Chief Eddie Compass admitted that his own officers took food and water from stores and that even now he cannot account for 300 of his 1,700 officers. As the city lurched into chaos, according to the Associated Press, armed thugs roamed the streets, teenaged gangs hijacked rescue boats, storm victims were robbed, shot, and raped.

Maintaining law and order is quintessentially a state and local responsibility. The blunt fact is that the governor, the mayor, and the police chief simply did not carry out that essential function. It was the poor, black citizens of New Orleans, trapped in the city at the mercy of the gunmen, who bore the main brunt of that failure. Perhaps Maureen Dowd might turn her passionate intensity to their plight and to those whose responsibility it was to enforce the law, even in the aftermath of the perfect storm.